A time of state persecution for Catholics in Prussia. Bismarck's Kulturkampf forms the backdrop to a cluster of Marian apparitions in the 1870s. In Marpingen in 1876, the see of Trier stood vacant, its bishop dead since May. A year later, in Dietrichswalde in Warmia, two poor Polish-speaking girls reported their visions, and Prussian officials saw fraud and nationalist agitation. The historian David Blackbourn later read Marpingen, Mettenbuch and Dietrichswalde together, set against the pressure of the Kulturkampf and the example of Lourdes.
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